Boehner, Where A Lawsuit Goes To Die

When Speaker John Boehner, the frightful leader of the GOP’s white-collar goon squad in the House, insists his lawsuit is not about him but rather a way to protect the Constitution against a rapacious president, don’t believe him. If it weren’t the Constitution, Boehner would surely find another ruse to put Barack Obama in his place. For the rest of us witnessing this Theater of the Absurd, we must steel ourselves for two more years against the frustrated congressman from southwestern Ohio, no matter the millions it will cost you and me.

The Constitution is a flaming buzz word on the right.

Having just reread Catherine Drinker Bowen’s “Miracle at Philadelphia ” (1966), a powerful narrative of the painful four months of creating a constitution for the 13 states, the miracle was that it eventually got to the states at all for ratification. The convention delegates were distrustful; suspicious of pitting big states against little states, of returning a monarchy to strangle the freedoms won in the Revolutionary War. (Obama we are told by modern dissenters, wants to be our king!); means of taxation; state’s rights; other issues debated by the delegates who were working on something new and without historical guidance in the heat of a Philadelphia summer.

The gouty Ben Franklin described the situation as an “assembly, groping as it were in the dark to find political truth”.

When you hear from the superficial application of the Constitution to today’s democratic system, you have to wonder where a John Boehner & Co’s loose talk would fit in to create the guiding principles that they bring up in the morning newscasts before breakfast. The answer: nowhere. As a North Carolina delegate quoted by the author observed: “It is much easier to alarm people than to inform them”.

When the convention adjourned after the millions of words pro and con on every issue, George Washington wrote to Thomas Jefferson that the historic document was “much to be wondered at…little short of a miracle.”

If I were a rich man, I’d send a copy of Bowen’s book to every blowhard right-winger on Capitol Hill to give them a context that would show them how their cries for freedom, impeachment or lawsuits are so self-serving and moronic..Really,folks. How can anybody take these Republicans seriously? It’s really not what the framers had in mind for a more perfect union..